Description:

From Hong Kong to Chile. Lebanon to Ecuador. Iraq to Colombia. Algeria to Argentina, Sudan to Puerto Rico, Iran to France and beyond, we "may be in the midst of the largest wave of nonviolent mass movements in world history," a group of political scientists recently observed.

Please join us on Martin Luther King Jr. Day for this panel discussion examining these momentous developments, both in their specificity and what they share in common.

Speakers:

Loubna El Amine teaches in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern. Her first book, Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation, was published in 2015. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled The Foundations of Confucian Political Thought: History, Law, and the Political Community, for which she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies. She holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University and a BA in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut.

William Hurst teaches in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern. He works on labor politics, contentious politics, political economy, and the politics of law and legal institutions, principally in China and Indonesia. He is the author of The Chinese Worker after Socialism (2009) and co-editor of two books, Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (2009) and Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (2014). He authored the article "China's weakness on display in stalemate over Hong Kong protests" in 2014.

Daniel Borzutzky is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UIC. He is a poet and translator from Spanish. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, won the National Book Award. His most recent publication is Lake Michigan (2018). He is an editor of Kenning Editions and has overseen the publication of new translations from Cuba and Argentina. He also serves as the Intercambio (Spanish-translation) poetry editor at Chicago’s MAKE Magazine and he is an artistic director for MAKE’s Lit and Luz Festival, an ongoing collaboration between writers and artists from Chicago and Mexico.

Kaveh Ehsani is Assistant Professor International Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies at DePaul. His research focuses on the historical and contemporary impact of oil on society and politics; the historical sociology of warfare; the politics of property, land use, and water; the urban process and spatial change in Middle East cities; and the political economy and geopolitics of post-revolution Iran. He is co-editor of Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Oil Industry (2018). He has been a contributing editor to the journals Goftogu (Dialogue) in Tehran, Middle East Report (MERIP), and Iranian Studies.

Shailja Sharma is Professor of International Studies, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Global Asian Studies at DePaul University, where she teaches courses on Migration and Forced Migration, Identities and Boundaries, Cultural Analysis, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Postcolonial Minorities in Britain and France: In the Hyphen of the Nation-State (2016) and co-editor of New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the US (2006). She authored the recent article "In India, citizens are rising up against hate" (https://tinyurl.com/yhydfpcq).

This event is free of charge and open to the public.